Flutterby™! : The Zoom where it happens

When this whole stay-at-home thing started, I paid for a Zoom account, and ended up as co-host of a couple of regular meetings. Mostly I'm happy to stay in the background, watching the participant list for people who forgot to mute before they flushed, but people notice that the meeting runs better when I'm there.

There's a new housing development going in a few blocks away from me, the folks behind it noticed, and asked if they could pay me to fill that role for one of their community outreach meetings. I never know what to charge, so I said "how about a donation to a mutually agreeable charitable organization?", they said "is $200 okay?", I thought "a hundred bucks an hour for me to learn something sounds decent" and the meeting happened last night.

It was a developer's community outreach meeting. It demonstrated why I think the education that Know Before You Grow does is so important. I have all sorts of complaints about the particulars, but that's not important. That's reason I'm involved in KBYG and Petaluma Urban Chat, and we're not reaching all of the people who need to hear the message, but we're working on it. I will try to put the rants about the particulars of that in a more generic context, so I'm not seen as attacking a particular person.

But... I do not think of myself as a people person. I am happy to be the guy in the background running tech. At some point I started to take a more active role in the meeting, and... well... I'm not sure if I ended up more Phil Donahue or Maury Povich.

Anyway, I closed down the meeting and pried my face from the rictus where it had been as I was trying to be impartial, or at least appear that way. I learned a bunch. I think the developers got their money's worth. I have a new appreciation for city staff.

And it's harder to hide behind the microphone when the point is engaging and moderating.